Jimmy Carter, the Democrat elected president in 1976, is addressing the 2012 Democratic National Convention by video.

“I said then that America needs a president who shared your dreams,” Carter recalls of his nomination and election at the nation’s bicentennial, adding: “We have just such a leader in the White House.”

Carter has kept his distance from a convention which, ironically, is being staged in the Old South that the Georgian calls home — in Charlotte, North Carolina. And Carter was the last Democrat who won North Carolina’s vote for president — before President Barack Obama won it in 2008.